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With Timeline, Facebook Bids To Reinvent The Social Biography

As a Harvard buddy of Mark Zuckerberg, Samuel Lessin had early access to Facebook in 2004. The then-nascent web site instantly became a part of his life. “The sum of those conversations was how I expressed myself,” he says, “it’s how people express themselves.”

Timeline is potentially an omnivorous collector of personal data that you can format to tell your story. Countless software developers will create applications that not only provide a function but also automatically sends the data generated by those activities to Facebook

So it’s not surprising that when Lessin took a job at Facebook last year he became product manager of Timeline, which transmogrifies one’s Facebook profile to a linear self-account that accumulates the moments of your life — via communications among friends, photos, videos, links, check-in and other data — in a chronological presentation.

Facebook execs explain that while the previous profile was like a five-minute conversation between acquaintances, Timeline is like meeting a friend for drinks and spilling your soul until the bar lights flicker for closing time.

Users are encouraged to keeping adding information to make this conversation ever richer — sometimes by an anonymous pop-up persona that gently prods you to dig up and upload baby pictures, scans of your diplomas, videos of your Black Diamond ski runs, and other vivid ephemera.

But even on its own, Timeline is potentially an omnivorous collector of personal data that you can format to tell your story. Facebook will allow countless software developers to create applications that not only provide a function — listening to music, reading news stories, keeping track of exercise sessions — but also automatically sends the data generated by those activities to Facebook.

If you so choose, this information can be used only for one’s personal reminisces, like a private scrapbook stored in a secret place. More commonly, it will be integrated into a Timeline shared with friends, family, and the near-random human flotsam winding up on in one’s Facebook cohort. (Those concerned with privacy can tailor the information to specified groups of friends, or even to shape what each individual friend can view.)

This is why Facebook has to still be considered the favorite in the social-network sweepstakes. Among its proudest achievements, Google has invented a self-driving auto. Facebook has devised a self-driving autobiography.

Indeed, Sam Lessin confirms that autobiography was the metaphor Facebook had in mind while designing Timeline. Your supersized image profile picture is akin to a cover photo. You can collapse items into a table of contents. You can decide what to highlight and what to bury in fine print.”We want to give people the canvas to express themselves,” he says.

Lessin even claims that there is an incentive for people to present themselves with candor in their Timelines, not just presenting a happy-face façade that’s as phony as photo portraits people choose to represent themselves in data sites. If you’re phony, he says, your friends will be turned off. “Authenticity is so prized.”

Still, Timeline is quite different than a traditional autobiography. As critic William Zinsser has written, “Writing is a powerful search mechanism … it allows you to come to terms with your life’s narrative.”

Zinsser’s own book about autobiography is called Inventing the Truth. The title comes from the late New York Times columnist Russell Baker, who upon beginning his memoir, told his wife, “I’m going upstairs to invent my life.”That invention was a work of hard mental cogitation and confrontation with the scary realities that come from John Woo-style faceoffs with one’s inner self.

The Facebook method spares users from that brutal process. Zinsser hasn’t seen Timeline — it is still only open to developers — but after I explained it to him, he sufficiently grasped the concept to make a key point: “Compiling is just collecting — in an autobiography you have to find a narrative and become protagonist in your own story.”

Yet, Lessin claims that eventually Timeline will allow users to do just that, and Facebook has hired a guy named Nicholas Felton to help. This is a significant coup: Felton is the geeky bard of the “Quantified Self” movement, a rarified, data-driven form of navel-gazing. Every year he compiles relevant statistics from his life and with stunning graphics produces an “Annual Report” that reveals a powerful personal narrative. He’s like the offspring of Mary Karr and Edward Tufte, if Bill James had been the midwife. Now he’s bringing his tools to Facebook.

“One of the things I’ve learned through my annual report process is that creating these visual artifacts — like a map on the wall with a pin everywhere you traveled — is meaningful,” Felton says. He says the Timeline will enable millions to exceed that power by adding what his own annual report lacked — photos, video, links, messages from friends.

What is Felton’s advice for Timeline users who want to make the most evocative personal accounts?

“You should upload more photos and check in more,” he says, “because if you do you’ll have more material for this fascinating Timeline.” (Of course, by doing so, users not only provide themselves fodder for more expressive Timelines, but they also hand over a wealth of personal information to Facebook itself, presumably to be used for advertising purposes. But that’s a narrative for another day.)

Since Lessin was so eloquent on comparing Timeline to traditional autobiography, I wondered what was his favorite autobiography. After some thought, he cites Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. It is the 18th Century philosopher’s final work, Lessin explains, and the book’s stories are imbued with the pathos of a dying man summing up his life.

But what if Rousseau had lived in the Facebook era? Could he have produced something as powerful in a Timeline?

“That’s the goal,” says Lessin.

I won’t take a cheap shot and say that if Rousseau had access to Facebook’s Timeline, he might have presented each walk only by date, time, geo-tags, and digital pictures snapped along the way. I guess it’s possible that if Rousseau were living today, and had the digital creativity of a data artist like Nicholas Felton, he would produce an awesome, heart-rending Timeline.

Still, after consulting “Reveries,” I’m pretty sure that you would not produce something like it on a Facebook Timeline. Even a brief excerpt indicates that Rousseau’s views are at odds, at the least, with Mark Zuckerberg’s share uber alles ethic:

I have in the world neither relative, friend nor brother…if I contemplate anything around me, it is only distressing, heart-rending objects; everything I cast my eyes on conveys some new subject either of indignation or affliction.. I resign my thoughts entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my own soul; that being the only consolation that man cannot deprive me of.

I admit it. If some future civilization stumbles on a buried 21st century Facebook data center and manages to decode the servers, all those Timelines may provide valuable information about how we live and how we see ourselves, and even significant glimpses of the individual lives they chronicle.

But I hope that those explorers keep digging until they find copies of Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Russell Baker’s Growing Up, and, yes, Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

They will find invented truths that yield more treasure than even the most artfully curated multimedia and data.